White House strategist Steve Bannon argued forcefully in an interview published on Wednesday that the US is in an “economic war” with China, and the confrontation with nuclear-armed North Korea is just “a sideshow.”
“To me the economic war with China is everything and we have to be maniacally focused on that,” he said in the interview with the American Prospect.
“If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover,” he said.
In a telephone interview with American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner, Bannon was dismissive of US President Donald Trump’s vow to bring down “fire and fury” on North Korea if it continued to threaten the US with missiles and nuclear weapons.
“There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” he said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
“We’re at economic war with China,” he said. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing.”
“One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩), appealed for dialogue to preserve stable relations when asked about the comments by Bannon.
“There is no winner in a trade war,” Hua said at a regular news briefing. “We hope the relevant people can refrain from dealing with a problem in the 21st century with a zero-sum mentality from the 19th or the 20th century.”
Hua appealed for dialogue to “preserve the sound and steady growth of China-US relations.”
On Monday, Trump instructed US trade officials to look into whether to launch a probe into whether Beijing requires foreign firms to hand over technology as a condition of market access.
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